Bits & Pieces (48 page)

The reaper's expression was difficult to read beneath the flaring red of the hand tattooed across his face, but even so the lift of his eyebrow and the tilt of his head conveyed plenty of meaning. He held out the ropes. They were torn apart, shredded. It was clear even to Marty that it hadn't been done with a knife, either.

The rope ends looked gnawed.

Zeke squatted down and touched the dirt at the base of the trees, where deep marks were cut into the ground. Footprints.

But they were not made by human feet.

Each print was huge, bare of shoes, with wide-splayed toes. The tip of each toe print was gouged deep into the dirt as if by a savage claw. The reaper placed one palm over the clearest of the prints. It was bigger than his whole hand.

“That ain't no dog,” muttered Zeke. He looked genuinely frightened. Sweat beaded on the red ink tattooed across his face. “And it's too big to be a wolf. Or . . . at least not any kind of wolf I ever want to see. Except . . .”

“What?” asked Brother Marty.

“I don't know. Something my granddad told me once. Some old legends from the deep woods in Canada where I grew up.” He half smiled, then shook his head. “No, that's stupid stuff. That's fairy-tale crap. Forget I said anything.”

“No, I want you to tell me,” insisted Brother Marty. “What exactly are you saying here?”

Zeke looked at him for a long five count, then down at the prints, then off into the woods. Finally he shook his head.

“I'm not saying anything, brother,” he said in a wooden voice.

“Where's the body? Who took it? What'd they do with it?”

“It's gone.”

“I can see that it's gone, genius. I'm asking you to tell me what you're suggesting?”

“I'm not suggesting anything, brother,” said Zeke. He paused, and in a more confidential tone said, “Look, Marty, all kidding aside here, you know me. I can track pretty much
anything. My dad and granddad took me hunting soon as I could walk. They taught me how to track like a pro. I can read signs. I can do that like you read a book. But I got to tell you, man, I don't want no part of this. No sir. Tell on me to the Honored One if you got to, but I've said all I'm going to say.” He got to his feet and pointed into the woods. “And I will not go looking for whatever made those tracks. Not for anything.”

Brother Marty glared at him, but Zeke shook his head. He dropped the pieces of chewed rope and backed away from the paw prints. Then he turned and stalked back to his quad, muttering, “This is too weird for me, man. This is way too weird for me.”

Then he stopped and came back to Marty. “I'm just a grunt, brother,” he said quietly, “and you're on the Council of Sorrows, so my opinion doesn't mean either jack or squat. But we've been friends ever since we got scooped up by the Night Church. I thought we could, you know, talk to each other.”

“Say what you want to say, Zeke,” said Marty irritably.

Zeke pointed to the place of execution. “I think we should bug the heck out of here and not tell anyone about this. Not Saint John, not the Council . . . not anyone.”

“Why?”

“Because this spooks me, man.” The big reaper actually shivered. “Whatever this is . . . it's wrong. Wrong in ways I can't put into words. It's creeping me out. I say we bug out and write this off.”

Marty studied him. Before he knelt to kiss the knife, Brother Zeke had been an enforcer for a group of road pirates working the Dakota badlands. Before that he'd run with a
biker gang. He was not an imaginative or fanciful person. He was also not stupid. If he was scared—and that was evident from the man's tight face, nervous glances, and twitchy eyes—then Marty did not want to stick around to try to prove that this was all nonsense.

Not for one second longer.

“Okay. We're out of here right now,” Marty told the reaper. They exchanged a look that was equal parts understanding and agreement and moved quickly down the slope to their quads.

They fired up the quads and roared away at full speed.

It was a very large, very strange world, and not all of that strangeness belonged to the plague. Marty wondered if they had just cruised the edge of something older and less defined even than the dead rising to eat the living.

They never once looked back.

Marty was afraid that something would be watching them go.

Area 51

Tom Imura had taught Benny and his friends to be warrior smart.

It was all about a way of thinking. A way of acting and reacting to the world. A way of working with the world in the way that it actually was rather than in the way one assumed it was.

Tom was a practical man. That he had died was no fault of his own.

Benny was seldom practical, but he was working it. Flexing that muscle. If he lived long enough, he figured he'd get there.

The current odds on that, however, were pretty crappy.

He dodged under the whooshing swing of the wicked scythe and tried to cut the leader of the reapers down, but he missed. The force of his swing sent him sprawling on his face, and for a moment all the reapers had a perfect chance to slaughter him.

If any one or two of them had tried, Benny would have died right there.

As it was, all of them attacked at once, each of them so eager and desperate to make the kill that they gave absolutely no thought to themselves or one another.

They crowded in, and stabbing knives met reaper flesh, shoulders collided with shoulders, heads cracked together. Like a clown act from a May Day festival, the reapers reeled back from one another. Not one blade had touched him.

With a whimper of mingled joy and shame, he quickly rolled sideways and scrambled to his feet. His mind burned with the thought that the only reason he was still alive was because he'd been so incredibly clumsy that he'd somehow infected the reapers with stupidity.

He knew, however, that it was going to be a momentary thing.

“Come on, Tom,” he said under his breath, “some Zen wisdom would be good right about now.”

Tom did not say a word, and Benny could imagine his
brother doing a face-palm and walking away in embarrassed disgust.

“Thanks,” muttered Benny.

Three of the reapers were hurt, two badly. They reeled away from their fellows, one clutching an arm that had been laid open from biceps to wrist, the other clamping hands over a chest wound that pumped bright blood.

That left five, one of whom had a deep cut on his forearm, but that didn't seem to keep him from gripping his ax with fierce intent.

Benny's mind raced through the countless hours of warrior-smart training, the endless scenarios Tom had drilled into Benny, Nix, Lilah, Chong, and Morgie. Solo attacks, group attacks, all sorts of variations.

One of Tom's most important rules started shouting at him inside his head.

Stay in motion.

Suddenly Benny felt himself move, felt his arms lift, felt the sword come alive in his hands. It was an illusion, of course; it was the training kicking in, those hours of repetition. It was muscle memory and reflex and his deepest need to survive.

Fight a single enemy, never a group.

He rushed at the closest reaper and battered aside the fall of a butcher knife that was aimed for his heart. As he parried it, Benny stepped to the side so that for a moment the reaper was between him and the others.

Isolate an enemy and engage.

Benny cut the man across the upper shoulder, aiming to wound rather than kill. The reaper shrieked in pain and
staggered back. Right into the arms of two others who'd been trying to circle him to get at Benny.

If retreat is impossible, attack without hesitation.

Benny lunged to one side, going behind the tangle of reapers, chopping and slashing at their arms and thighs. Two of the three reapers buckled, falling into the third and bearing him to the ground. Benny leaped over the closest reaper and then leaped backward as another of the killers hacked at him with a meat cleaver. As the big blade sliced downward an inch from his nose, Benny pivoted and kicked him sharply in the knee. As the man crumpled, Benny kicked him again, this time in the chest, knocking him backward against a woman reaper who had a pair of hatchets. One of the blades flew straight up into the air, and Benny struck the other with his sword, taking it and part of the woman's hand in one slice.

Out of the corner of his eye, Benny saw the leader come charging at him with the scythe.

Benny began to smile. He was winning this.

He was going to win.

He rushed forward into the attack, bringing his sword up in a graceful, powerful sweep, his body set and balanced for the parry and the counter-cut that would destroy this reaper.

Sword met scythe blade.

Benny felt the shock of the impact shiver through his hands and vibrate along his arms. The force was ten times what he'd expected, and he found himself falling backward, the sword dropping from nerveless fingers. It clanged onto the hard ground, and Benny thumped down onto his back.

The reaper with the scythe stood over him, panting with fury.

Benny twisted and kicked out, aiming for the man's knee with a ground-fighting kick Tom had taught him.

With a snarl of contempt the reaper moved his leg, and as Benny's foot shot past, the man snapped out with a kick of his own. It caught Benny in the back of the calf. The man pivoted on the ball of his foot and side-kicked Benny in the chest, knocking him flat and breathless.

Benny tried to roll over to hands and knees. But couldn't.

He tried to reach for his fallen sword. But couldn't.

Tried to come up with one of Tom's rules for a situation like this. For anything that would save him.

But couldn't.

The scythe rose into the air. The other reapers—those who could still stand—clustered around to watch him die. The blade reached the apex of its lift, and golden sunlight ignited along the wickedly sharp edge.

“No!” cried Benny.

And the reaper said, “Unnh . . .”

It was a soft, surprised grunt.

The scythe trembled in the air and then fell backward as the reaper's fingers uncurled from it. It landed hard.

The reaper's knees began to bend. Slowly, slowly . . . until he dropped down into a kneeling position directly in front of Benny.

He said, “Unhh . . .” again.

Then the reaper fell flat on his face and did not move.

The other reapers stared in shocked horror.

Not at the fallen body. Nor at the leather-wrapped handle of the knife that stood up from between the reaper's shoulder blades.

They stared past their leader's corpse.

As did Benny.

A man stood there.

Tall. Grizzled. A scarred and tanned face and the coldest blue eyes Benny had ever seen. Beside the man stood a monster of a dog. Two hundred and fifty pounds of mastiff, but with armored plates all over him and a spiked helmet.

Joe Ledger said, “Sic 'em.”

Benny could swear the dog laughed as it leaped forward to attack the reapers.

And they, armed and in greater numbers, stood no chance at all.

Southern California

Hard miles broke slowly under their feet as they ran.

The woods all around them were filled with the dead, though, and every way they turned they encountered teams of reapers leading packs of zombies. Some packs had only a dozen of the dead, but the farther west they went, the larger the packs grew. Once they had to stop for ten minutes as a swarm of at least a thousand of the dead shambled by.

Samantha and Heather shared out the tassels among the girls, and there were enough for each of them to tie half a dozen to their clothes. For a while they worried whether that would be enough, but as the afternoon burned toward sunset, it became clear that the dead were not drawn to them. Either
they could not smell living flesh through the chemical stench, or the stench deceived them into thinking the girls were other zombies.

All the time that they were running and hiding Samantha was trying to understand what she'd done back in the clearing. She could have given the reaper a chance to run, could have left her with at least a tassel. She could even have cut her throat and given her the quick death the woman apparently wanted.

Instead she'd left her to be consumed by monsters.

Please . . .

Even though the reaper's screams had faded into nothingness hours ago, Samantha knew that they would echo inside the caverns of her soul forever.

Like all the girls, Samantha had grown up hard and along the way had been forced to spill blood many times. Human in defense, animals when hunting. Zombies constantly.

But never once had she been cruel.

Never once had she treated life without regard.

Never once had she been as much of a monster as the things that haunted and hunted her.

Until today.

Please.

With the hard miles her tears had dried, but she never ceased wanting to stop where she was and simply collapse in tears. Maybe in the path of the reapers.

As they ran, she occasionally caught quick looks from the other girls. Each of them assessing her, judging her, measuring themselves and their own potential for darkness against what she'd done. None of them met her eye. Maybe it was
contempt, pity, or perhaps to prevent Samantha from seeing a familiar darkness in the eyes of a friend.

The sun seemed to expand into a supernova as it fell down behind the western haze.

The six of them moved downland through rougher country than the reapers chose to use, cutting into ravines and through dense brush. It was slow, but it gave them safety, and the terrain would slow down any attackers, human or otherwise. The dying sun spilled its paint box across the sky, splashing the horizon with gaudy shades of blood and fire.